40 percent of Americans think ‘Israel treats Palestinians like Nazis treated Jews’
If you don’t want to socialize with people who support Israel, or you think Israel treats Palestinians the way Nazis treated Jews, you’re antisemitic, according to a new survey of antisemitism from the Anti-Defamation League.
The survey goes further than ever in the effort by the Israel lobby to brand “highly negative” views of Israel as bigotry. Released last week, and promptly seconded by the American Jewish Committee, the ADL survey reports that 40 percent of Americans believe that Israel treats Palestinians as Nazis treated Jews — a remarkable indication of Israel’s sinking reputation in the U.S.
Americans’ belief in antisemitic ideas of Jewish conspiratorial influence have doubled just in the last three years, the survey alleges, with a “surge” in antisemitic acts. But surprise– the ADL links that increase to Israel.
“We also found a significant overlap between anti-Jewish conspiracy theories and highly negative sentiments toward Israel,” the ADL’s Jonathan Greenblatt explained in his usual puffball interview on MSNBC, by Andrea Mitchell last week:
So, you hate the Jewish state, chances are you also deeply dislike the Jewish people…. It takes my breath away to think that literally 70 percent of Americans are telling us they are unwilling to spend time or be in the same space with a person who supports the Jewish state. I mean that is without precedent…. Honestly, it’s a scary snapshot.
Greenblatt appears to be exaggerating his own statistic on Americans’ unwillingness to hang out with Zionists– the survey says 18 percent. But the anti-Israel index includes several attitudes such as that one that are perfectly legitimate: Israel and its supporters are a bad influence on our democracy (24 percent agreement), Israel treats Palestinians like Nazis treated Jews (40 percent), Israel is not a strong U.S. ally (22 percent).
“It’s wildly irresponsible for the ADL to run together polling about antisemitism with polling about Israel,” Rafi Magarik says on twitter. “It is a brazen attempt to remove Israel’s behavior from the sphere of political debate, and to paint critics of Israel as Jew haters.”
“Since the creation of Zionism, millions of Jews were opposed to the creation of an explicitly Jewish state in historic Palestine,” Max Berger writes. “Were all of those Jews anti-semites? Are anti-zionist Jews today?”
Greenblatt’s aggressive rhetoric is not new. He has said that anti-Zionists are as dangerous to Jews as rightwing antisemitic nationalists. He has called for a war on anti-Zionism in the Palestinian solidarity movement and inside the Jewish community.
In his interview with MSNBC, Greenblatt blamed social media and youth for the antisemitism rates and said we should design “programs” and “interventions” to counter the problem. Of course neither he nor Andrea Mitchell acknowledged that Israel’s conduct is any part of the problem, that Israel ought to stop practicing apartheid or persecuting Palestinians. That attitude is surely antisemitic.
Greenblatt has also gone on the warpath against the Nation story that documents that Ken Roth formerly of Human Rights Watch lost out on a fellowship at Harvard’s Kennedy School because of the influence of pro-Israel donors.
A recent @thenation piece constructs a multilayered conspiracy theory grounded in a series of suppositions about powerful pro-Israel Jewish philanthropists working themselves into positions of power at the @Kennedy_School. It’s classic #antisemitism.
The Israel lobby has been saying as much for two decades: If you talk about the Israel lobby you’re an antisemite. It’s a strategy to grant political immunity to apartheid, a strategy that will only generate more hatred toward the Jewish establishment — when young Jews are walking away from that community in “swaths” because of Israel.
Here’s the survey. Israel is intermixed from the start. The ADL’s list of antisemitic tropes includes beliefs that Jews are more loyal to Israel than the U.S., that Jews have too much influence in the business world and on Wall Street “and too much power in the United States today.” And Jews go out of their way to hire other Jews (53 percent of respondents agree) and Jews are not “warm and friendly” (17 percent).
The ADL promptly conflates the alleged rise in these attitudes with criticisms of Israel.
ADL has seen the ways in which criticisms of Israel can exceed policy critiques and instead morph into traditional anti-Jewish conspiracy theories and antisemitic tropes as well as be weaponized to malign or increase hostility toward Jews generally.
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